911: LETTING IT HAPPEN
By Ken McCarthy
[Posted 1 February 2001]
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[Ken McCarthy is an unrepentingly honest political analyst who writes what
he thinks in an email newsletter and at his Website, www.brasscheck.com ]
A lot of people have trouble believing that there is a possibility that 9-11
was 'allowed' to happen. That's understandable given the enormity and
savagery of the crime.
However, be that as it may, there are a great many things that remain
unexplained about that day and a great deal of what has been offered by way
of explanation is total and utter nonsense.
The problem is that cutting through the garbage that is the 'news' is a more
than full time job and not likely to be undertaken by the news media - or by
Time's Man of the Year, Rudolph Giuliani, a former prosecutor and supposed
lover and leader of New York who has shown no curiosity whatsoever about
toxic substances still present downtown, the total structural failure of his
city's tallest buildings, and the details of how thousands of people came to
be killed in his city.
Anyway, all is not lost. Someone is watching and sorting out the fact from
fiction. The most detailed report on holes in the 'we were caught off guard'
story:
http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/indict-1.htm
The other day, someone sent me a long, involved e-mail disputing my position
on 9-11. The thesis of his disagreement was this: since his wife, who was
riding in the back seat of a cab when she heard about the World Trade
crashes, took a long time to realize that the second hit on the WTC was an
act of aggression, therefore it is reasonable that the US military would
have been similarly confused and unprepared.
This seems to me the basis of a lot of people's thinking. The rest of this
article is what I wrote back to this fellow:
CNN may not have known that Middle Eastern terrorists have been training for
this exact kind of mission since the 1980s, but many people did. (1)
Yoseff Bodanksy, who is not exactly a fringe figure, wrote about airport
training camps dedicated to hijacking and suicide air bombings in detail in
a book published in 1993 called "Target America."
If reading "old" books is too much work, how about this refresher course:
Bush, on his trip to Italy just weeks before 9-11, was aware that there was
a threat on his life from precisely such an attack when he was in Genoa. The
pictures of the surface-to-air batteries set up to defend Genoa were all
over the news media at the time:
[Start excerpt from LA Times]
"WASHINGTON -- U.S. and Italian officials were warned in July that Islamic
terrorists might attempt to kill President Bush and other leaders by
crashing an airliner into the Genoa summit of industrialized nations,
officials said Wednesday.
"Italian officials took the reports seriously enough to prompt extraordinary
precautions during the July summit of the Group of 8 nations, including
closing the airspace over Genoa and stationing antiaircraft guns at the
city's airport.
[End excerpt from LA Times] (2)
Also, the WTC was well known to be a constant, high profile terrorist target
by every NY law enforcement organization and by every intelligence agency in
the country, and that I got directly from Peter Caram, the former head of
intelligence at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Caram
communicated and shared files with the FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, State Department
and Naval Intelligence.
It's one thing for your wife to be confused about what was happening that
day. But it's preposterous to accept that the people in charge of the
nation's defense had any confusion about what was going on when the second
plane hit.
In news reports, the significance of the second hit was supposedly relayed
to the Pentagon from the street by a NYPD cop via his cell phone. A cop may
have been one of many who made a call, but that leaves the false impression
that the military needed to be advised by someone in the city to know what
was going on.
In fact, the whole thing was reported live, blow by blow on Coast Guard
radio which, the last time I checked, is part of the US military. There was
no time delay between the second hit and the realization that the city was
under attack by suicide jet airliners. In fact, the Coast Guard radio
operator who had a clear view of the second plane's approach before it hit
was reporting on the open air waves about the second plane:
[Start 'Harbor Heroes,' Motor Boating Magazine, December 2001]
"On the bridge, Peter Johansen, the company's director of marine operations
and a 17-year veteran of the maritime industry, settles in for the 18-minute
crossing. As he heads for downtown in the morning's golden sunshine,
Johansen, for some inexplicable reason, looks up. At that moment he sees a
plane disappear into the north tower of the World Trade Center. 'Did I just
see what I think I saw?' he says to himself. 'Was that an accident?'
"Across the harbor on Bay Street in Staten Island is Coast Guard Station New
York. From this office, there's an uninterrupted view of the water, the
Statue of Liberty and the New York City skyline. Inside, Petty Officer Jason
Moberly presides over a daily operations meeting. As Officer of the Day,
Moberly runs the show when the Commanding Officer is off the premises,
giving him charge over personnel, equipment and operations. At 8:50 a.m., he
gets up to refresh his cup of coffee and spots smoke rising from one of the
Twin Towers.
"Moments later an alarm sounds and the phone rings. Moberly receives word
that a plane has struck the north tower. He has two rigid inflatable boats
and a 41-footer at his disposal. 'I wasn't sure what we would need,' he
says, 'but I knew we would need to respond.' He launches all three boats
toward the scene.
"Peter Johansen and his team carried 150,000 people off the island.
"At Pier 11, Johansen's ferry drops its passengers and backs into the East
River. By phone and radio, Johansen alerts the rest of the staff about the
incident and directs additional boats to the ferry barge at North Cove
Marina, which sits across the street from the towers. Anticipating a spike
in traffic exiting lower Manhattan, he heads there as well.
"Back at Coast Guard Station New York, Moberly awaits an update from his
crews as they approach the scene. He's not prepared for the three words he
hears when at last the radio crackles to life: 'It's gonna hit, it's gonna
hit, it's gonna hit.'
"He looks out across the harbor just as Johansen's ferry pulls into North
Cove. Overhead, United Flight 175 strikes the south tower and the sky erupts
into a ball of fire. At that moment, Moberly, Johansen and the rest of the
world realize this is no accident. 'After that,' Johansen recalls, 'there
was a very somber sense of emergency and that people were going to do what
they could to help.'"
[End 'Harbor Heroes,' Motor Boating Magazine, December 2001] (3)
Finally, planes have gone stray before and been responded to with no
procedural glitches or unexplainable delays such as we saw on 9-11. Here we
have the case of multiple planes being off course for long periods of time
and yet not responded to, even after one slammed into a building and a
second behaved in an obviously menacing manner.
I don't claim to know exactly what went on that day, but the story as
presented is full of deliberate misrepresentations of the facts and in my
experience when people go to such lengths to offer misleading information,
they have something to hide.
--Ken McCarthy
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Further Reading:
=======================
1) TIME Magazine wrote that security officials viewed commercial airliners
as potential nightmare weapons. See
http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/indict-3.htm#u
2) 'Italy Tells of Threat at Genoa Summit,' LA Times,
September 27, 2001, can be read at
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-092701genoa.story
If that link should go 'down' we will post abackup of the Motor Boating
article at http://emperors-clothes.com/9-11backups/genoastory.htm
3) The article about the Coast Guard is from Motor Boating Magazine,
December 2001 issue. It can still be read at the following link:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:UqsaTAwrmNQC:www.motorboating.com/featu
res/harbor_heroes.html+%22coast+guard%22+second+plane+world+trade+boating&hl
=en
If that link should go 'down' we will post abackup of the Motor Boating
article at http://emperors-clothes.com/9-11backups/coastguard.htm
For further discussion of the official story about 9-11, see:
The first few articles, with asertiks (*), are from our main series, 'Guilty
for 9-11: Bush, Rumsfeld, Myers - Dedicated to the firefighters of New York.'
* Section 1: 'Why Were None of the Hijacked Planes Intercepted?'
[Posted 14 November 2001]
http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/indict-1.htm
* Update to Section 1:
[Posted 18 November 2001]
http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/indictupdate.htm
* Section 2: 'Mr. Cheney's Cover Story'
[Posted 20 November 2001]
http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/indict-2.htm
* Section 3: 'Bush in the Open' - What George Bush knew before he went to
the Booker School on 9-11
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/indict/indict-3.htm
'Scrambled Messages' - 'New York Press' article based on the 'Guilty for
9-11' Series. by George Szamuely
[Posted 14 December 2001]
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/szamuely/scrambled.htm
'Map & Timetable for American Airlines Flight 77'
[Posted 8 December 2001]
http://emperors-clothes.com/images/maptime.htm
'Map of Andrews Air Force Base'
[Posted 20 November 2001]
http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/andrewsmap.htm
Frequently Asked Questions on 9-11, including
http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/faq.htm
Includes: 'FAQ #1 - Nobody was prepared for 9-11' and
'FAQ #2 - Planes did scramble on 9-11. They just arrived late.'
'Criminal Negligence or Treason?' by Jared Israel
Commentary on a 'NY Times' article
[Posted 15 September 2001]
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/treason.htm
'9-ll: Ho-Hum, Nothing Urgent'
by George Szamuely
Research & documentation by Illarion Bykov and Jared Israel
http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/urgent.htm
'Reader Says Emperor's Clothes Wrong on bin Laden, 9-11'
A very interesting debate.
[Posted 28 September 2001]
http://emperors-clothes.com/letters/wrong.htm
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